Whatever trouble Vera and the "Young Master" had caused the Space-Time Divine Artifact, the Undead's operations in Calimshan proceeded more or less as planned.
They began by clearing the eastern side of the Alamir Mountains. That was mainly a job for Earth-Element Law mages.
After hundreds of enormous Fire Genasi had rampaged through the area, almost everything had been burned to ash. Only a few large pieces of metal and stone remained on the surface.
The ground was nothing but soil baked by intense heat and hardened into clumps. Cracks and gullies had opened at the foot of the mountains, and some places were even strewn with glasslike fragments. Hill guessed that was because Calimshan's soil was badly degraded and the area lay close to the sea.
At first, the Earth-Element Law mages brought up soil from a meter below the surface. They soon discovered that it was unusable too. The Fire Genasi were not entirely to blame; Calimshan's land had been poor to begin with.
They had to dig down three meters before they found actual soil instead of wasteland that was two-thirds sand. Yet fresh water had always flowed down from the Alamir Mountains, and a waterway linking Steam Lake to the sea lay only a dozen or so kilometers away.
Even Hill was surprised by how poor the soil was. The people of Calimshan had probably never heard of soil conservation. He suspected they had grown crops that exhausted the land until the harvests failed, then abandoned it. That would explain why there were no nutrients left within three meters of the surface.
The Fire Genasi could not have done that much damage.
Once the Earth-Element Law mages had turned the soil and the Water Law mages had let a fine rain soak the ground, Vera led